At the newly-redesigned site SF Novelists, Tobias Buckell asks: “Is the novel dead?” — “The exact form of the novel may change, but the act of writing words in order to create an experience in a reader’s head offers an advantage in fiction you won’t find in movies: the ability to live in someone else’s mind for the duration of a story.”

4 Comments on SF Tidbits for 8/7/07

“The exact form of the novel may change, but the act of writing words in order to create an experience in a reader’s head offers an advantage in fiction you won’t find in movies: the ability to live in someone else’s mind for the duration of a story.”

Gee where else can I experience that except for a novel???

Oh ya…a short story.

Is the Novel dead?

God I hope so.

99% of them are simple short stories with a bunch of useless crap thrown in to bilk readers.

Joshua, while there certainly are more than a few novels that could have been improved by being cut down to a short story, I think it’s far, even very far, from being the majority.

Ok…but how about simply cut down? I mean my god, the Risen Empire and the Killing of Worlds were 2 books each over 300 pages long…Jonathan strange and Mr Norrell was 800+ and i am still uncertain if anything happened at all in that book.

TSP On This Day

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